I'm having problems taking good indoor shots with both my S400 and A80 Canon digicams. Quite often, if I leave the flash on the picture is too dark..but..if I turn the flash off the picture is blurry. I've tried the different scene modes on the A80 but none worked.

What am I doing wrong? Is this an inherent problem with small digicams?

The answer to you dilema depends on the indoor shooting conditions - how much ambient light there is and how far away you are. Typically the flash on a digicam will only be affective for 10 feet or less (at least in my experience). So, if you are indoors and farther away that would explain the underexposed flash photos. I know with my old S40 the flash was terrible - even when I had a Digital Rebel, the onboard flash was weak - I had an old Olympus point-and-shoot film camera about the same size as my S40 and the flash seemed WAY better. So, back to your question:

If you can get within 7 feet or so then you should be able to use the flash. If you need to be farther away, the best bet is to set your camera to shoot with the widest aperture (don't know if those models have an Av mode - if they do, use it and set the aperture to the smallest F-stop the camera supports). Also make sure the flash is turned off. The other thing you can do is change the ISO setting on the camera - although even ISO 200 is pretty noisy and will need noise-reduction software applied to it. That's about the best you can do with poor lighting and a digicam.

My most recent experience was taking my son to a Globetrotters game. We had good seats (row 6) and the lighting was of course good yet I still couldn't get a decent shot. With flash they were too dark, without they were blurry. I think the A80 does have Av mode but I wasn't familiar with using it.

This has happened many times before -- inside attractions at Disney, etc...so maybe I just need to go back to my old Rebel S film camera. Looks like all these small digicams have the "problem". Would a digital SLR do better?